Sujeto de la Educación I

Eje 2: Childhood Physical Development

What to expect of physical development in childhood

Physical development
Children do a lot of growing while they are in primary school. Primary school spans a number
of milestones as well:
Children master gross and fine motor skills, from holding a pencil and learning to write, to
playing sports, and even playing musical instruments.
Children grow out of things. They’ll start losing baby teeth, and parents may need reminders to
get new shoes for children after a growth spurt.
Around eight or nine years old, children may begin to show early signs of puberty. Puberty can
be an uncertain time for children, who may become self-conscious of changes or start to
compare themselves with more mature peers. Hormonal changes can lead to moodiness.

All babies grow in the same order but at different pace. One seven-month-old might be
crawling around and chattering madly. Another might be plaiying silently on his playmat. One
five-year-old can look like he’s still only four, while another can look like he belongs with the
seven-year-olds.
Developmental achievements are often called ‘milestones’ an there are certain physical
milestones.
 Gross motor skills involve the coordination and control of large muscles and skills like
walking, sitting and running.
 Fine motor skills (or manipulation) involve the coordination and control of small
muscles, and skills like holding a rattle, picking up crumbs and scribbling with a pencil.
 Vision is the ability to see near and far, and to interpret what’s seen.
 Hearing is the ability to hear, listen to and interpret sounds, whereas speech is the
ability to produce sounds that form words. Language is something different again, but
also important.
 Emotional and social behaviour and understanding is your child’s ability to learn and
interact with others, including skills for play and communicating with other people and
children

Physical development provides children with the abilities they need to explore and interact
with the world around them. A young child’s physical growth first begins as muscles gain
strength and children gradually develop coordination. The development of muscular control is
the first step in this process.
The term motor development refers to physical growth or growth in the ability of children to
use their bodies and physical skills. Motor development often has been defined as the process
by which a child acquires movement patterns and skills. Genetics, size at birth , body build,
nutrition and culture an all influence motor and physical development.

What to expect of physical development

Physical development by six months: He will show basic distinctions in vision, hearing,
smelling, tasting, touching, temperature and perceiving pain. He will also lift his head when on
his stomach and possibly show squeals of delight as well as grasp objects and roll over.
Physical development by 12 months: He can control his torso and hands, sit without support,
crawl and has growing control of legs and feet. He may stand or creep across the floor.
Physical development by 18 months: Can creep or crawl up stairs, possibly walk, draw lines on
paper with crayon and will show growing physical independence.
Physical development by age two: He can go up and down steps, run, sit self on chair, use a
spoon and fork, turn single pages in a book, kick a ball, attempt to dress himself, build a tower
of six blocks, kick a ball and has bowel and bladder control (though he may not care to show it
and be toilet trained!).
Physical development by age three: He can run well, march, stand on one foot briefly, ride a
tricycle, feed himself (with a bit of mess), put on his own shoes and socks (though not tie
laces!), unbutton and button.
Physical development by age four: He can skip on one foot, cut with scissors, wash and dry his
own face, dress himself, throw a ball overhand and other skills to show growing independence.
Physical development by age five: He can hop and skip, dress without help, has good balance
and smoother muscle action, skate or ride a scooter, print and write simple letters, establish
whether he is left or right handed. Girls' fine motor skill development is likely to be about one
year ahead of boys.
Physical development by age seven: He can stand on one foot with eyes closed for three
seconds, walk on a line in heel-toe fashion, skip on both feet, possibly ride a bicycle without
training wheels, jump rope, catch and bounce a tennis ball and tie shoelaces.
Physical development by age nine: He has the capability to roll, bat, kick and throw a ball,
which makes him able to play organised sports such as soccer, cricket and basketball. His
strength and coordination will continue to develop with practice.
Physical development by age 12: Puberty can start to appear at this age, which is why you’ll
see kids developing at different rates between the ages of eight and 18. With growth spurts
come clumsiness and a lack of coordination. If your child is not athletic, help him find a sport or
physical activity he enjoys. At this age, kids who don’t excel athletically are tempted to avoid
all physical activity.

Fine and Gross motor skills

Motor skills: the intentional, or goal-oriented, movements of our bodies. They involve
voluntary movements, such as walking, running, waving our arms, or jumping up and down, as
well as more refined movements, such as dancing, playing tennis, climbing rocks, and even
performing surgery. They must first be learned and then voluntarily reproduced. Motor skills
can be broken down into two categories: fine and gross. Gross motor skills are those skills that
involve our larger muscle groups, such as the arms, legs, or use of the entire body. Fine motor
skills involve small, controlled movements of the wrists, hands, and fingers or ankles, feet and
toes.

Early Development of Motor Skills

The early physical development of a child has two major components: physical fitness and
motor skill development. Along with a child’s body, motor skills develop as a child matures.
Motor skill development reflects a child’s ability to control and direct his or her voluntary
muscular movement. Early motor skills begin with simple reflex movements and later develop
into lifting the head, rolling over, and sitting up straight. With time and practice we see those
movements develop into crawling, walking, and running. A child’s ability to perform a motor
skill is directly related to physical fitness and this is calculated by attributes such as body
composition, strength, flexibility, and endurance.

Learning Fine and Gross Motor Skills

In a baby, simple reflexes form the basis for the later development of more complex motor
skills. Think about how babies first move their arms and legs or how they naturally grasp your
finger. Those initial movements are reflexive, so the movements just happen naturally. Babies
even have a natural stepping reflex, which if practiced regularly, will strengthen the baby’s
legs, causing a tendency in a baby to walk a few weeks earlier than a baby who was not
practiced.
The development of a child’s gross motor skills are important for the future development of
fine motor skills. A child must first learn to use larger muscles before using the smaller ones.
For example, until a child has developed the use and control of her arms and hands, she
cannot develop the use of the little fingers she will later need to button her buttons or write
her letters.
We also use our large muscles to maintain balance and to coordinate all major muscle
movements like running, jumping, kicking, and climbing trees – all of the things that kids like to
do together. A child who has undeveloped gross motor skills will be less likely to run around
and have fun with the other kids, something which is necessary for social development.
The smaller muscles do the work of grasping objects, fastening clips and buttons, and writing.
The use of these muscles involves strength, fine motor control, and dexterity. Fine motor
control involves the intricate coordination of muscular, skeletal, and neurological functions,
and often, doing so in conjunction with the eyes. . The earliest stages of fine motor skill
development start with clapping hands and touching fingers. Later on, they learn to work
buttons, zip zippers, and tie knots. As they mature, you can teach them paste things on paper,
work puzzles, and color.

Stages of Motor Learning

Motor learning is the relatively permanent change in the nervous system associated the
practice and improvement of motor skills. If you have noticed how spasmodic and wobbly
children are as they learn new skills, then you have probably also noticed that with time, those
movements become smoother and more stable. You may have also noticed this in yourself
when you are learning how to dive, serve a tennis ball, or execute a martial arts kick. You start
out somewhat clumsy, but the more you practice, the better you get. All of that is motor
learning at work.
There three stages in which motor learning occurs:
1. The Cognitive Stage: During this stage, one must develop an overall understanding of the
skill – its overall goal and the environmental factors which affect the ability to execute the
skill. At this stage, a learner relies on observation and trial and error. A child watches adults
walking around, getting from one place to another, long before the child ever attempts
walking. The child processes the purpose of walking just by observing others walk.
The same thing happens any time we learn a new skill.
2. Associative Stage: After much trial and error, the learner begins to show improvement. The
movement becomes more refined. As your nervous system starts to get the feel for the
movement, it becomes more fluid and you have to think less and less about it. This is called
“getting the feel for it.” You start to experience a sense of rightness in the movement and
along with that, you get a kind of charge out of it.
3. Autonomous Stage: This is the stage of the relatively permanent imprinting of the neural
pattern required to execute the movement. At this point, the skill is virtually automatic. In
learning the tango, it’s that moment when your leg just wraps itself around your partner’s.

Influences on Development of Motor Skills

The successful learning of a skill depends upon the intensity of interest in learning it. The
neurological term which refers to the physiological and psychological state of excitement in
the nervous system about learning a new skill is arousal. Arousal is crucial for instigating the
psychological attitude and all of the behaviors required for learning a new skill. Stress also
plays a role in learning a skill. We know that too much stress has a direct effect on our learning
capacity. Optimum performance in motor capacity is a balance of moderate stress and arousal.

Fine and Gross Motor Skills and the Cognitive Connection

Jean Piaget suggested that sensory and motor experiences are the foundation for all
intellectual functioning. Piaget said that intelligence is “first displayed when reflex movements
become more refined, such as when an infant will reach for a preferred toy, and will suck on a
nipple and not a pacifier when hungry.”
Recent research has demonstrated a clear connection between motor and cognitive centers in
the brain. The relationship between motor and cognitive skills is especially complex in infants.
This is because infants are learning both fine and gross motor skills, and at the same time,
cognitively processing a continuous flood of new information coming in from the strange new
world around them.
Other investigators, like Jana M. Iverson, even suggest a relationship between motor
development and language development.
During the first eighteen months of life, infants acquire and refine a whole set of new motor
skills that significantly change the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the
environment… motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant
to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose; and that the emergence of
new motor skills changes infants’ experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant
for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language.
For an infant, practically every minute of their waking lives is spent learning and developing
motor skills.

Speech and language development linked to physical development in childhood

Speech and language are the tools humans use to communicate and share thoughts, ideas, and
emotions. For babies and children, they come to know these tools and develop at a varying
rate.
Language differs from speech in that language is the set of rules, shared by the individuals who
are communicating, that allows them to exchange those thoughts, ideas, or emotions. Speech
is talking, one way that a language can be expressed. Language may also be expressed through
writing or things like signing.
The most intensive period of speech and language development for humans is during the first
three years of life, a period when the brain is developing and maturing. These skills appear to
develop best in a world that is rich with sounds, sights, and consistent exposure to the speech
and language of others.
There is increasing evidence suggesting that there are “critical periods” for speech and
language development in infants and young children. This means that the developing brain is
best able to absorb a language, any language, during this period.
An infant's first ability to express his needs begins with crying during the first days of life. As
jaw and mouth mechanisms develop, he is gradually able to make and mimic sounds and
words. By eighteen months, he should have a vocabulary of at least eight to 10 words. He will
eventually be able to express his needs, desires and thoughts as he grasps the concept of word
and object association.

Typical speech and language skills in childhood development

Six months: Vocalises with intonation; Responds to her name; Responds to human voices
without visual cues by turning her head and eyes.
12 months: Uses one or more words with meaning - often mama or dada; Understands simple
instructions, such as bye-bye or bed; Is aware of the social value of speech.
18 months: May have a vocabulary of between five to 20 words; May repeat a word over and
over again, often called echolalia; Is able to follow simple commands.
24 months: Can name familiar objects; Combines words into a short sentence; The majority of
what they say will be intelligible and the vocabulary might be 150-300 words; Rhythm and
fluency of speech won't be great - neither will their volume and pitch; Can use pronouns
correctly - I, me, you, although me and I are often confused.
Three years: Is using some plurals and past tenses; Knows chief parts of body and should be
able to indicate these if not name; Handles three word sentences easily; Has a vocabulary of
900-1000 words; About 90% of what child says should be intelligible; Verbs begin to dominate
the speech; Understands most simple questions dealing with his environment and activities;
Should be able to state her sex, name, age; Should not be expected to answer all questions
even though she understands.
By 5 years: Can use many descriptive words spontaneously - both adjectives and adverbs;
Knows common opposites: big-little, hard-soft, heave-light, etc; Has number concepts of four
or more; Can count to ten; Speech should be completely intelligible, in spite of articulation
problems; Should know his age; Should have simple time concepts: morning, afternoon, night,
day, later, after, while; Should be using fairly long sentences and should use some compound
and some complex sentences; Speech on the whole should be grammatically correct.
By six years: She will have mastered tricky consonants such as: f, v, sh, zh, th, l; Speech should
be completely intelligible and socially useful; Should be able to tell one a rather connected
story about a picture, seeing relationships; Between objects and happenings.
By seven years: Should have mastered consonants like s-z, r, voiceless th, ch, wh, and the soft
g - as in George; Should understand complex opposites like: girl-boy, man-woman, flies-swims,
blunt-sharp short-long, sweet-sour; Understands such terms as: alike, different, beginning,
end, etc; Should be able to tell time to the quarter hour; Should be able to do simple reading
and to write or print many words.
By eight years: Can relate rather involved accounts of events, many of which occurred at some
time in the past; Complex and compound sentences should be used easily; Should be few
lapses in grammatical constrictions; All speech sounds, including consonant blends should be
established.

First Language Acquisition: Basic Concepts

Linguists in the tradition of Noam Chomsky tend to think of language as having a universal core
from which individual languages select out a particular configuration of features, parameters,
and settings. As a result, they see language as an instinct that is driven by specifically human
evolutionary adaptations. In their view, language resides in a unique mental organ that has
been given as a "special gift" to the human species. This mental organ contains rules,
constraints, and other structures that can be specified by linguistic analysis.
Psychologists and those linguists who reject the Chomskyan approach often view language
learning from a very different perspective. To the psychologist, language acquisition is a
window on the operation of the human mind. The patterns of language emerge not from a
unique instinct but from the operation of general processes of evolution and cognition. For
researchers who accept this emergentist approach, the goal of language acquisition studies is
to understand how regularities in linguistic form emerge from the operation of low-level
physical, neural, and social processes.

The Basic Components of Human Language

Human language involves both receptive and productive use. Receptive language use occurs
during the comprehension or understanding of words and sentences. Productive language use
involves idea generation and the articulation of words in speech. Both reception and
production utilize the four basic structural components of language:
Phonology: The system of the sound segments that humans use to build up words. Each
language has a different set of these segments or phonemes, and children quickly come to
recognize and then produce the speech segments that are characteristic of their native
language.
Semantics: The system of meanings that are expressed by words and phrases. In order to serve
as a means of communication between people, words must have a shared or conventional
meaning. Picking out the correct meaning for each new word is a major learning task for
children.
Grammar: The system of rules by which words and phrases are arranged to make meaningful
statements. Children need to learn how to use the ordering of words to mark grammatical
functions such as subject or direct object.
Pragmatics: The system of patterns that determine how humans can use language in particular
social settings for particular conversational purposes. Children learn that conversations
customarily begin with a greeting, require turn taking, and concern a shared topic. They come
to adjust the content of their communications to match their listener's interests, knowledge,
and language ability.
These four basic systems can be extended and elaborated when humans use language for
special purposes, such as for poetry, song, legal documents, or scientific discourse. The literate
control of language constructs additional complex social, cognitive, and linguistic structures
that are built on top of the four basic structural components.

Methods for Studying Language Acquisition

The primary method involves simply recording and transcribing what children say. This
method can be applied even from birth. Tape recordings become particularly interesting,
however, when the child begins systematic babbling and the first productions of words. Using
videotape, researchers can link up the child's use of verbal means with their use of gesture and
nonlinguistic cries to draw attention to their desires and interests.
Methods for studying comprehension are a bit more complicated. During the first year,
researchers can habituate the infant to some pattern of sounds and then suddenly change that
pattern to see if the infant notices the difference. From about nine months onward, children
can be shown pictures of toys along with their names, and then researchers can measure
whether the children prefer these pictures to some unnamed distracter pictures. Later on,
children can be asked to answer questions, repeat sentences, or make judgments about
grammar. Researchers can also study children by asking their parents to report about them.
Parents can record the times when their children first use a given sound or word or first make
some basic types of child errors. Each of these methods has different goals, and each also has
unique possibilities and pitfalls associated with it. Having obtained a set of data from children
or their parents, researchers need to group these data into measures of particular types of
language skills, such as vocabulary, sentences, concepts, or conversational abilities.

Phases in language development

Children tend to produce their first words sometime between nine and twelve months. One-
year-olds have about 5 words in their vocabulary on average, although individual children may
have none or as many as thirty; by two years of age, average vocabulary size is more than 150
words, with a range among individual children from as few as 10 to as many as 450 words.
Children possess a vocabulary of about 14,000 words by six years of age; adults have an
estimated average of 40,000 words in their working vocabulary at age forty. In order to
achieve such a vocabulary, a child must learn to say at least a few new words each day from
birth.
One of the best predictors of a child's vocabulary development is the amount and diversity of
input the child receives. Social interaction (quality of attachment; parent responsiveness,
involvement, sensitivity, and control style) and general intellectual climate (providing enriching
toys, reading books, encouraging attention to surroundings) predict developing language
competence in children as well. Relatively uneducated and economically disadvantaged
mothers talk less frequently to their children compared with more educated and affluent
mothers, and correspondingly, children of less educated and less affluent mothers produce
less speech. Socioeconomic status relates to both child vocabulary and to maternal vocabulary.
Middle-class mothers expose their children to a richer vocabulary, with longer sentences and a
greater number of word roots.
Whereas vocabulary development is marked by spectacular individual variation, the
development of grammatical and syntactic skills is highly stable across children. Children's
early one-word utterances do not yet trigger the need for syntactic patterns, because they are
still only one-word long. By the middle of the second year, when children's vocabularies grow
to between 50 and 100 words, they begin to combine words in what has been termed
"telegraphic speech." Utterances typical of this period include forms such as "where Mommy,"
"my shoe," "dolly chair," and "allgone banana."
At this same time, children are busy learning to adjust their language to suit their audience and
the situation. Learning the pragmatic social skills related to language is an ongoing process.
Parents go to great efforts to teach their children to say "please" and "thank you" when
needed, to be deferential in speaking to adults, to remember to issue an appropriate greeting
when they meet someone, and not to interrupt when others are speaking. Children fine-tune
their language skills to maintain conversations, tell stories, ask or argue for favors, or tattle on
their classmates. Early on, they also begin to acquire the metalinguistic skills involved in
thinking and making judgments about language.
As children move on to higher stages of language development and the acquisition of literacy,
they depend increasingly on broader social institutions. They attend to science teachers to gain
vocabulary and understandings about friction, molecular structures, the circulatory system,
and DNA. They rely on peers to understand the language of the streets, verbal dueling, and the
use of language for courtship. They rely on the media for role models, fantasies, and
stereotypes. When they enter the workplace, they will rely on their coworkers to develop a
literate understanding of work procedures, union rules, and methods for furthering their
status. By reading to their children, telling stories, and engaging in supportive dialogs, parents
set the stage for their children's entry into the world of literature and schooling. Here, again,
the parent and teacher must teach by displaying examples of the execution and generation of
a wide variety of detailed literate practices, ranging from learning to write through outlines to
taking notes in lectures.

Stages

In nearly all cases, children's language development follows a predictable sequence. However,
there is a great deal of variation in the age at which children reach a given milestone.
Furthermore, each child's development is usually characterized by gradual acquisition of
particular abilities: thus "correct" use of English verbal inflection will emerge over a period of a
year or more, starting from a stage where verbal inflections are always left out, and ending in a
stage where they are nearly always used correctly.
There are also many different ways to characterize the developmental sequence. On the
production side, one way to name the stages is as follows, focusing primarily on the unfolding
of lexical and syntactic knowledge:

Stage Typical age Description

Babbling 6-8 months Repetitive CV patterns
One-word stage 9-18 months Single open-class words or word stems
(better one-morpheme or o
ne-unit)
or holophrastic stage
Two-word stage 18-24 months "mini-sentences" with simple semantic relations
Telegraphic stage
"Telegraphic" sentence structures of lexical rather
or early multiword stage 24-30 months
than functional or grammatical morphemes
(better multi-morpheme)
Later multiword stage 30+ months Grammatical or functional structures emerge

Babbling: At about seven months, "canonical babbling" appears: infants start to make
extended sounds that are chopped up rhythmically by oral articulations into syllable-like
sequences, opening and closing their jaws, lips and tongue. The range of sounds produced are
heard as stop-like and glide-like. Fricatives, affricates and liquids are more rarely heard, and
clusters are even rarer. Vowels tend to be low and open, at least in the beginning.
Repeated sequences are often produced, such as [bababa] or [nanana], as well as "variegated"
sequences in which the characteristics of the consonant-like articulations are varied. The
variegated sequences are initially rare and become more common later on.
Both vocal play and babbling are produced more often in interactions with caregivers, but
infants will also produce them when they are alone.
It has often been hypothesized that vocal play and babbling have the function of "practicing"
speech-like gestures, helping the infant to gain control of the motor systems involved, and to
learn the acoustical consequences of different gestures.
One word (holophrastic) stage: At about ten months, infants start to utter recognizable words.
Some word-like vocalizations that do not correlate well with words in the local language may
consistently be used by particular infants to express particular emotional states: one infant is
reported to have used to express pleasure, and another is said to have
used to express "distress or discomfort". For the most part, recognizable words
are used in a context that seems to involve naming: "duck" while the child hits a toy duck off
the edge of the bath; "sweep" while the child sweeps with a broom; "car" while the child looks
out of the living room window at cars moving on the street below; "papa" when the child hears
the doorbell.
Young children often use words in ways that are too narrow or too broad: "bottle" used only
for plastic bottles; "teddy" used only for a particular bear; "dog" used for lambs, cats, and cows
as well as dogs; "kick" used for pushing and for wing-flapping as well as for kicking.
These underextensions and overextensions develop and change over time in an individual
child's usage.

Acquisition and learning